Comic 419 - Shopping Star, Burning Bright, Page 4

Author Notes:

Hey, that story about Alex training himself finally pops up in WaR itself! Yeah, this has been an idea for a long, long time, just not really had any opportunity to bring it up in this comic before. Those who read the Blues crossover will know Alex did use that explanation there.

This wound up being a pretty significant change from plans for later. As you could probably tell by the book two cover there was to be a chapter where Laura outright found out about the Starchild identity in person; that chapter itself wound up being pushed back (the plan is still to do it, just with some retooling) but for the purposes of this chapter, I decided to go ahead and have Alex tell her now. Multitude of reasons for that, but the main things are it makes it easier to deal with the fallout of this whole Lillian situation and to do the plot for this chapter and her and Lillian's subplot in the next one. Yeah, we'll be seeing the gym thing firsthand in the next chapter if you're wondering.

And hey, we've got cameos! First off, man, the midnight screenings aren't anywhere near as worth watching with Jake no longer in them. At least apparently by 2026 he and Brad reconcile. And they seemingly don't age at all.

And besides them, there are Dan and Amelia hanging out! I have no clue whether or not these two are going to appear in any sort of actual role again beyond the last BP chapter, I'm considering it, but Adam opted to throw them in here and I'm glad for it. Nice to get a little follow-through on them and see that a day removed from the Manslaughter situation, things are okay. And besides all that, we've got a kid who's now carrying a squid!

I don't think I've ever actually been in a mall with a movie theater in it. I'm aware of the concept but never actually seen such a thing in person.

Heheh... This page was quite a bit of fun to do; it's been a while since I went nuts with cameos so was happy to stretch my legs a bit here. If anything I was surprised I didn't do more.

Like Martin said, we get a human-Inkling in the first panel holding an Inkay. To cap it off the grown-up she's talking to is a humanized version of Squid Girl. Whether these two are at all related to the Takeru look-alike in Blues is anyone's guess. I mostly did this cameo since Martin's been playing a lot of Splatoon.

Third panel... Yeah, it's eleven years later and Brad is still dragging Jake it terrible movies. ^^ This is honestly a cameo I've been meaning to do for years; me and Martin kept saying to each other if we ever have a scene in a movie theater we'll put Brad and Jake in there, but just never came up. I was sick of waiting and a lot of malls have theaters so here we go. Funnily enough Dan and Amelia were originally gonna be an elderly couple; not sure what made me go this route with them. If you'll look close you'll see Amelia actually is wearing an engagement ring; that wasn't me. Martin actually added that touch when drawing her.

I think I originally had some ideas in mind for the posters in the second panel too but no idea what they might've been. Only one offhand that makes any sense being the one on the far left being called "Clue: The Shitty Version."

..... Oh, right, story, yeah. I do really like how Laura is so cool with "Dorothy" being a super-hero. It's great to meet a friend with such an open mind. If I had to guess I would've expected her to object to it, but since we're going that story route with Laura anyway it's probably better that she's fine with the idea.

Also, Laura's t-shirt just has a fist on it. .... Since Alex is in that "Cute" T-Shirt I sorta wanted to give Laura something weirdly masculine to wear. You'll notice she's the only one of the three wearing pants.